by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
Every four hours now, at the change of each watch, the Midshipmen raised the thermometers chained in the palm oil tanks and logged their readings as the heat in the steam-coils brought the thick liquid slowly up to discharge temperature. Such were the cosmetic properties of this oil that they had the softest, cleanest hands of anyone on the ship.
‘Hands like poofters,’ remarked the sailors good-naturedly as they walked past the toiling middies.
‘Sod off.’
‘Oooo, don’t talk like officers, do they, Spike?’
‘Nope. Must be too much working wid us, Charlie.’
‘You could tell dey was sailors by the semen on dere boots.’
‘Sod off’
The mood of crude and brittle levity increased as we approached Gibraltar. Passing the Rock we hoisted the four-flag signal that denominated the Antigone of Liverpool, and called up the Lloyd’s Signal Station with the aldis lamp. The news of our transit of the Strait would appear in Lloyd’s List the following morning.
But the fragility of our gaiety was proved next morning, for the Atlantic greeted us with a gale, a west-north-westerly gale that butted us on the nose as we stretched out for Cape St Vincent. Cold, damp weather drove down upon us, sending us to our cabins and interrupting the final flourishes of decoration about the ship. It increased in fury during the grey day so that we laboured, pitching in the sea, our well-decks awash with green water and the tarpaulins shiny under the constant deluge. White specks crept across the burnished brass and a rime of salt encrusted the superstructure.
‘Bloody weather,’ swore the Bosun, shaking his head in disbelief at his ill-fortune.
Off Cape St Vincent we swung north, and the wind veered to head us, keeping us pitching and working as Antigone thrust the great seas aside, seemingly eager to sniff the polluted air of the Mersey. At eight o’clock that night I took over from a morose Mike, for whom every second of delay was a betrayal of fate. Miles to the eastward the lights of Lisbon threw a glow on the scudding clouds and on the radar screen the bearing cursor and range marker intersected over the glowing cluster that marked the Berlings.
‘She’s all yours…’
Out on the bridge-wing the wind screamed and I lifted the glasses to watch a smaller ship than ourselves pitching madly in the darkness. I swept the horizon, then raked it again with my eyes elevated a few degrees above it, a trick for picking up pin-points of light by avoiding focusing on the retina’s over-worked blind-spot. Apart from our bucking neighbour there was nothing else about. Then something caught my eye, something nearer, a flicker of black, like a great bat wing sweeping across the ship. For a second I thought I was imagining things, then I saw an inexplicable movement on the well-deck, a second flutter of something huge, suddenly flung up against the sky and whipped to leeward with an ominous, dull crack. Thoroughly alarmed I dashed into the wheelhouse and lifted the aldis lamp from its cradle. The narrow beam stabbed the darkness and the lookout called down from the monkey island above, ‘Looked like a tarp, Fourth…’
‘Bloody hell!’
Dropping the lamp beam I caught the edge of the hatch coaming with it at Number Two. Bare steel reflected the lamp-light: the hatch tarpaulins had gone. A sea reared up cascaded over the rail, swirling about the hatch and pouring off the after end of the well-deck as Antigone lifted.
I ran back into the wheelhouse and seized the telegraph, rang Stand-by and altered course, slowing the ship and heaving her to, head to sea. Quite suddenly the Mate was beside me, now awesomely transformed to the Old Man.
‘What’s the matter, Laddie?’
‘I’m not sure, sir, but I think the tarps are off Number Two.’
‘Are they, by God…’ he turned as Mike too came back on the bridge. ‘It looks as if the tarps might have come off Number Two,’ he said. ‘Go down and have a look.’
‘How the hell…?’ Mike began, but the Old Man cut him short.
‘Never mind how! Get cracking!’
I told him the course I had steadied on. ‘Three-one-oh, sir, and half speed.’
‘Very well.’ He jangled the telegraphs and reduced to slow ahead. ‘Go and give him a hand. Take the middy with you.’
The Midshipman had completed writing up the engine movements in the record book. We grabbed torches and left the bridge.
‘Get your seaboots and an oily on as quick as you can. I’ll see you by the starboard saloon door in two minutes.’
He ran off and I went and took my own advice. Two minutes later we emerged into the centre-castle. Mike was just in front of us. Round the corner of the superstructure we met the full fury of the wind and bent, crouching forward, loping into the lee of the forward contactor house and edging round it to try and assess the extent of our loss. If the tarpaulin was gone there was nothing to stop the sea from pouring into Number Two hold through the interstices between the hatch boards and the beams. Enough sea could start to flood the ship, even float off the hatchboards. That was an extreme possibility; it would be bad enough if water got down to spoil the cargo.
Forward of the contactor house we were completely exposed, though as the ship rose on the seas we felt the shelter of the distant forecastle. Nevertheless our oil-skin coats tore at us and it was an effort to make forward progress. The after end of the well-deck, at the foot of the ladders, was waist deep in water. Mike hesitated, playing his torch beam on the bare boards of the hatch. Part of the tarpaulin remained, about a third had been lifted and torn off by the strength of the wind, shredded past the locking bars laid over the hatch as an added precautionary measure. Simultaneously, Mike and I sensed there was something wrong, illogically wrong. Between us the Midshipman stared, open-mouthed.
‘Look sir!’ he played his torch beam along the exposed and gleaming edge of the coaming, where the derrick runners of our cargo gear had polished and scored it. The weather edge of the tarpaulin was still secured tightly by the wedges. The canvas showed no signs of strain, no fraying as of natural rupture. Its edge was sharp.
‘It’s been cut!’
The thought and its implications struck us instantly. Mike rounded on the Midshipman. ‘Go and tell the Old Man some bastard’s cut the tarpaulins.’ Then he turned to me. ‘I’m going to get the Bosun and the Crowd…’ he paused a minute and I sensed the conflicting thoughts racing in his brain. ‘I don’t believe this is true,’ he said, and blown to leeward by his billowing oilskin he disappeared round the corner of the contactor house. I stood for a moment, alone. Antigone rose and fell, her flared bow protecting her suddenly vulnerable hold. We would be all right; we would get another set of tarpaulins over in an hour or so. It would be difficult with the wind blowing; perhaps if the Old Man turned the ship down wind it might make things easier…
But the Old Man had different thoughts, thoughts that proved him wiser than I. Coming round the contactor house I heard him bellowing a summons back to the bridge. I scrambled back up there.
‘Is it true?’ he shouted at me.
‘That it’s been cut? Yes, it looks like it.’
He swore, itching to be active and irked by the restrictions of his new rank.
‘The Second Mate’s turning out the Crowd, sir… perhaps if we get the ship before the wind…’
‘Eh? What’s that? Run before it? Not bloody likely. She’ll scend…’ he waved his hand to port where the seas ran huge, ‘lift her stern and bury her bow so that the well-decks fill…’ he left the rest to my imagination and I saw the justice of his assertion. It might be open to debate at the Board of Trade, but not here and not now.
‘They might have trouble with the wind under the tarps,’ he added, ‘but at least the risk of their being washed overboard will be minimal. No, she’s all right as she is…’ And he patted the teak rail, as though Antigone was a favourite horse.
It took an interminable time for Mike to rouse out the hands. Perhaps it was only a few minutes before the dark and shining figures appeared, but it seemed longer. The Midshipman and I had hoisted
the two red lights that indicated we were ‘not under command’, warning that other ships could not expect us to take avoiding action. Our neighbour had vanished, but the radar now showed more vessels in the vicinity.
Torchlight flashed momentarily across the wheelhouse windows: Mike was signalling that he was ready.
‘Give ‘em some light down there,’ shouted the Old Man and I flicked the switches. The forepart of the ship was thrown into vivid relief. Figures, leaning against the wind, moved forward. I could see Chippy’s bulk attacking the wedges he had so assiduously driven home, which the unknown saboteur had left in situ. His mate came behind him with a sack, collecting them lest they float away.
‘Shall I go down and lend a hand, sir?’ I too was frustrated by my inaction.
‘No. You take one bridge-wing and the middy the other. Keep an eye on the men. If anyone goes over the side…’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
At either extremity of the ship the Midshipman and I watched the struggle on the forward well-deck. I have no doubt now that the Old Man was right in not turning the ship. The greater buoyancy of the stern, the slow speed of the ship and the period of the waves would probably have inundated the low deck and added the risk of a pooping, but the wind tore at the men below and their exertions were almost proved fruitless. Two new tarpaulins were dragged forward and got down onto the hatch in a bundle. Dragged as far forward as possible they were cautiously unrolled and Chippy, Mike and the Bosun tried to secure the weather edge before exposing the full extent of the canvas rectangles to the grasp of the gale. But the impediment of winch beds, the turbulence created across the irregularities of the deck and the force of the gale which now perversely reached its crescendo, made the task all but impossible. We watched a demonic life of its own seize the heavy canvas, saw it tear itself wilfully from the seamen’s grasp, saw it flog under the lights, dark and shiny from spray, then lift and threaten to blow away.
For a second or two we thought it had gone. But Antigone lifted her bow, throwing the fore-deck into a brief lee. The power of the wind slackened and the canvas flopped, caught by a single corner where Chippy, swearing with the effort, his finger nails torn and bloody, struggled to retain a hold. Men flung themselves bodily onto the thing, as though subduing a monster, and then it was too sodden to lift, and even the gale failed to rend it from them further. Slowly it was dragged once more across the hatch.
But it was too much for the Old Man. He could no longer stand the inactivity; with a shouted ‘The ship’s yours!’ he slid down the starboard bridge ladder and a moment later appeared on the foredeck. Mike was performing prodigies and the intervention of the Old Man, who had again assumed the persona of Antigone’s Mate, would be unwelcome. I could hear him shouting. Snatches of instructions reached me on the bridge.
‘Get some dunnage planks, quick… and some nails… nail the bloody thing down, you’ll never hold it in this wind…’
The glow of the deck lights blinded us on the bridge to events beyond the limits of the deck. A quick look at the radar reassured me that no ships were approaching close, but there was no warning of the height of the sea that now bore down upon us. We dipped into its vanward trough and the sudden drop in the wind roused my instinctive suspicions, taking my attention from the scene below me. The lights on the forecastle samson posts were almost directly into my eyes but then I saw the crest, grey in the gloom, stretching out on either bow, a ninth wave of ninth waves, precipitous and hoary in its advancing slope, up which Antigone began to climb sharply.
‘Hold on!’ I screamed, my voice cracking with alarm. I do not know whether they heard me or whether their own instincts alerted them – the sudden cant of the deck, the variation in the howl of the wind – but there was another danger that transmitted itself to my own brain: Antigone was falling off the wind. The angle of the wave was brushing her aside, her speed, adjusted to a nicety while the wind and sea ran true, was now inadequate to hold her heading before the buffeting she was receiving.
I ran to the telegraph and jangled it to full ahead. Already the auto-pilot, sensing our deviation, was applying helm. Mercifully the engineer below was alert, mercifully Antigone was not sluggish to respond, and she was already turning as the crest burst upon her port bow. But the explosion of white that suddenly flared under the glow of the lights was followed by the boom and shudder of impact and then of solid water, green water, foaming across the rail with a rush that raised my heart-beat in an agony of anxiety. I saw men, black shapes knocked down to heads bobbing with upflung arms, dragged like dolls along the sluiced deck. Antigone rolled, water poured over the side at the break of the centre-castle. I could no longer see anyone, for they were masked by the centre-castle bulwark.
‘Has anyone gone over the side there?’ I shouted to the Midshipman, who was almost overboard himself in his conscientious attempts to keep the party under observation.
‘No… no I don’t think so!’
And then it was over. The passing of the great wave brought us a lull. Men fought their way back onto their feet and then by some corporate effort they were dragging the tarpaulin forward, its mass sagging under the weight of water it contained. A plank or two was swiftly nailed to hold it and then came the regular tonk-tonk of Chippy’s maul as the wedges went home.
I remembered to slow down again, making a mental note to communicate my gratitude to Billy who was on watch below. A figure loomed on the bridge beside me. It was palely pyjamaed and for a split second my over-strained imagination thought it the ghost of China Dick.
‘Everything all right, Fourth Mate?’
‘Oh, hullo Chief. Yes, I think so… a bit of a close shave though…’
‘Is that the Mate down there… I mean the Old Man?’ He nodded through the wheelhouse window to where, in a black huddle, the men were coming up from the well-deck and into the shelter of the centre-castle.
‘Yes.’
‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’ remarked the Chief Engineer, and I could hear the grin in his voice.
‘Get her back on course, Laddie,’ said the Old Man coming up the bridge ladder. He was soaked from head to foot.
‘You all right?’ asked the Chief.
‘Of course I am,’ replied the Old Man. ‘What are you doing up here?’
‘Keeping an eye on you,’ replied Mr Kennington.
‘I can manage.’ The Old man’s voice came from clenched teeth.
‘You’re bleeding…’
‘It’s nothing…’
The red lights came down and Antigone resumed her passage. We were under command again, heading north with the Berlings dropping astern.
We were conscious of having been lucky. Just how lucky we were not to know until we opened Number Two hatch in Liverpool and broke the bulk of our cargo. Water had got below, finding its way through the cracks between the hatch boards, but it had done no more than wet the outside of sixty or so chests of tea, and the ample dunnage floors we had laid prevented any cargo from spoiling. A prompt pumping of the hold-well had rid the ship of the water as it drained below, and our only casualties were a score of cuts and bruises borne without complaint. A further satisfaction was that the passengers never learned of the incident.
The strip of tarpaulin taken from the coaming showed the sharp edge of a knife slash, and the following forenoon the Old Man tried to establish the identity of the culprit. It was a horrendously serious crime, no less than sabotage, though why it had been committed remained as mysterious as its perpetrator, for no one could be proved to have done it.
Embleton was widely suspected, though he bore cuts and bruises to show he had played his part in redeeming the situation. Popular supposition blamed him and blamed his ignorance, that he did not know the extremity of the danger to which he had exposed us. But nothing was ever proved, for there were no witnesses to an act that spoke of malevolent vandalism rather than conspiracy.
Off Cape Villano the gale blew itself out, leaving a residual s
well to harry our crossing of the Bay of Biscay. Before the Spanish coast dropped below the horizon astern we were again invaded by birds. Some fifty Hoopoes came aboard to roost on the derricks, brilliant with chestnut, black and white plumage and Iroquois crests. They vanished as abruptly as they had come and we ploughed doggedly north-north-east towards the chops of the Channel.
The Channels
The Bay of Biscay and the fog patches of late spring reminded us that we were already further north than we had been when among the ice-floes of the Gulf of Po Hai. Spirits rose with every passing mile, inducing a kind of euphoric madness, a neurotic condition caused by the high, bubbling excitement of imminent arrival. This wild feeling of pure joy induced by return after long absence has been known to generations of British merchant seamen as ‘The Channels’. It was perhaps the clearest manifestation of the axiom that anticipation exceeds realisation. We had for a while thrown off that feeling of unimportance that came with the not knowing; in our own minds our return was appropriately Odyssean. Induced by ‘The Channels’, a few souls mustered in the radio-room to put through telegrams or link-calls, radio linked telephone calls fed into the British phone system via the Post Office radio station at Portishead. The unprecedented invasion of his lonely post almost brought a smile to the haggard features of Sparks, though they clouded when Mike appeared in the doorway.